CREATIVITY CRUISES ~ Sun, Sea, Sculpture & Song
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A Quiet Pool - on Meditation
There’s a hidden pool
at the very centre of it all,
behind the shrubbery
beneath the fallen leaves
and griefs,
beyond our thoughts and thorns
and if we’re still enough
we may sense
it's mirrored surface
reflecting everything.
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Do we dare to call this
something other than illusion?
dive inside
disappear
from everyday delusion,
reappearing merely as
a ripple on the surface?
Do we have the courage
to let fall the fantasies
to which we desperately cling,
sink into the cool,
let it hold us,
call this real?
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Somerset 2023
In addition to the Creative Writing sessions, you're also welcome to take part in a Poetry Workshop.
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Here, below, are a few poems from my recent publication:
The Quiet Pool
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Among these are explorations into the nature of consciousness and some musings on the atmospheres of places I’ve loved, while others are written from the grief of loss as well as the joys of living.
The poems in this collection are illustrated with images of my sculptures or more recent collages, while a few have been left to simply speak for themselves.
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I hope you enjoy them.
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An Old Tin Box
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An old tin box,
rectangular and black.
I’d peeped in here before,
when I was small,
a stolen moment in my parents’ bed room,
the box all shiny and exciting.
I remember struggling to get it open
but only found some tattered papers,
brown and curling.
So I locked it quick
and legged it.
Now, some fifty five years on,
I lift and carry it
as the treasure that it is.
Cool as marble, resonating.
It opens without trying.
Three generations lie here,
each on a bed of velvet,
documents and letters
and the deeper down I go
the frailer;
edges torn like skin,
some so delicate they hardly register.
Lifting each shallow tray in turn,
I find their birth and death certificates,
one as far back as the 18 hundreds.
And then a letter from my father
on the birth of their first-born,
I remember being told he’d had to walk
through one of the deepest snow-falls
Leeds had ever seen
to hand this to the matron,
and then back again,
without having been being invited in.
His words, as dignified as ever,
but with something else as well:
a complete surrender
to his adoration for the woman
lying in that hospital
with their new bundle.
Further down are birthday cards
in childish hand
and celebrations of their
fifty anniversaries
and then the first of the condolences,
an absence so palpable it chills.
And, lastly,
tucked away
in the corner of the final tray,
a pot of pills.
Full. Unused.
Instead, she’d waited,
swallowing just losses.
And as I place the final document
before I close the lid,
I add a scattering of ashes.
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Dedicated to my mother. 2021
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A River-Swim
Entering as guests,
hearts stilled,
thrilled by the sheer chill of it,
shocked again
at how we had forgotten.
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Its silken skin
kissed by offerings
from bowing heads of grasses
skimming pollen
along the snaking green,
to the scatterings of fallen catkins,
while overhead
a few white, downy feathers swing
from spider’s threads,
dancing in a pulse of sunlight
on the unseen side of trees.
The unseen side of things,
not to be forgotten,
a symphony of indecipherable messages,
among which, maybe,
is a “Welcome Home”.
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Somerset 2023
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Kayakoy
Hazy in the sun
a village swelters
in its pelt of pine.
Secrets steeped in silence
in this ghost town,
locked away within in a century
of crumbling walls and rust
and blood in dust.
Terraced houses
rise tall, steep,
and fall into the valley,
only grasses stir,
doorways open into hollow rooms
and broken shutters gape now
where the eyes once were.
Not even the soft murmurings of bees
disturbs these generations.
Lost, the bright kaleidoscopic chaos
of their laughter
of their gossiping and confidences
and of all the woven intermingling
of tongues and lives.
And Gods.
No colour here now, stones
bleached white as bone,
except where,
in the spring,
among the grasses
as the hot winds blow,
a sudden splash of crimson
where the poppies grow.
Turkey 2023, the centenary of Attaturk’s forced eviction
of the Greek population from their homeland in Turkey.
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The Old Town
Layer upon layer
of faces and of fragments
and of fallen stones.
Marble images
still vibrant with a life
they share now
with the laughing children
playing in the dust
of this old town.
I often walked those streets
passing women,
still as shadows in their doorways,
darkened carvings, waiting somehow.
And I wondered if,
beneath their feet,
other women,
stiller still
and carved from whiter stone
were still waiting to be found.
Bone on marble,
layer upon layer,
dust on dust.
And I remember too
the smiling, crooked man
trundling his cart,
his rounded back,
his useless bric-a-brack
those tins and bells,
their hollow chimes
echoing medieval times,
reverberating through
this labyrinthine heart,
pierced by this same light
through sun-splashed vines,
uniting, as it one day also must,
this gathering of children
with their dust.
Rhodes 1996
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Autumn
Now barely visible,
she’s pulled the covers
right up to her chin
and snuggled herself in
amongst the ferns,
among the ragged ponies
and the scattered sheep,
among the softening
greys and mists
as evening twists
through filigrees of trees.
Let’s let her sleep.
And when she wakes
perhaps we could be gentler
with her?
Kinder even?
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Somerset 2022
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Stanton Stones
Old stones, rose tinged
against a temperamental sky,
pitted, lichen skinned,
holding stillness like a secret,
dignified in a frivolity of light.
Some standing tall, some fallen,
some, with shoulder to the wind
now leaning in,
their presence resonating,
long, low draw of bow
across the velvet of a cello string.
Here it was we met
when the world went numb,
you in your bed,
I with hand on stone
sending messages
through it's frequency
and those of stars,
dissonant and harmonising,
crossing, crisscrossing
across this planetary map,
this place of worship,
portal, living tomb.
And now you’re gone
and here I am again
as wild winds gust,
trying to un-learn
the hopeless yearning
for some pattern that must
drive this vast,
chaotic accident of dust.
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Somerset 2022
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The Garden
The garden wakes,
she shakes her secrets from the patchwork dawn
and stretching out a toe into the light,
she hides a yawn.
So night dissolves
and slowly dons it’s shadowy disguise,
hiding slyly in the trees,
mimicking their movements
in the morning breeze.
Re-forming now as shadows,
they will steadily unfold
and, bold as brass,
they’ll soon be
stretching languorously
‘cross the lawn.
For now though, they are shy,
like timid children
staring after disappearing
parents on a station platform.
Meanwhile a hundred
windows wink,
a trail of song is strung out on the air,
sounds of crockery in kitchen sinks
as last night’s life is tidied under stairs.
And all along the street
different coloured doors are opening
as migrant metal birds
fly in from everywhere.
And so she waits,
content to pose for photos.
And perhaps she knows
the watching world will not be here for long,
then, all her shifting shadows can
in turn, shake free their day’s disguise
and rightfully return.
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Putney 2020